Search engines typically provide a source of indexed documents from the Internet (or an intranet) that can be rapidly scanned in response to a search query submitted by a user. As the number of documents accessible via the Internet grows, the number of documents that match a particular query may also increase. However, not every document matching the query is likely to be equally important from a user's perspective. A user may be overwhelmed by an enormous number of documents returned by a search engine, unless the documents are ordered based on their relevance to the user's query. One way to order documents is the PageRank algorithm more fully described in the article “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine” by S. Brin and L. Page, 7th International World Wide Web Conference, Brisbane, Australia and U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999, both of which are hereby incorporated by reference as background information.
A given user spends considerable time evaluating his or her search results. These evaluations identify web pages for the user that are either very useful, completely useless, or somewhere in between. If the user performs the same or similar searches at a later time, the user will typically have to start the search result evaluation process from scratch because the user will have forgotten most, if not all, of the prior analyses. Thus, most or all of the prior analyses are lost.
Several techniques and services have been developed to help a user search more efficiently and retrieve web documents of interest faster, with limited success. A user can simply bookmark web pages that the user finds valuable. Social bookmarking services (e.g., furl.net, spurl.net, hyperlinkomatic.com, simpy.com, gibeo.net, del.icio.us, citeulike.org, connotea.org, linkroll.com, openbm.de, feedmelinks.com, unalog.com, igooi.com, and blogmarks.net) permit a user to save his or her bookmarks to a public web site and tag them with keywords, comments, and/or ratings. A9.com permits a user to save bookmarks and the corresponding web pages on a central server. Yahoo!'s My Web permits a user to save a web page, add notes to the page, choose a folder to store the page in, and exclude certain web pages from future searches. Eurekster.com reorders web search results based on web pages viewed by a user's social network.
These various services, however, do not improve a user's subsequent web searches as much as they could because they do not take full advantage of the user's analyses of prior search results (or fail to use these analyses at all).
For example, most of the bookmark-related services do not integrate the bookmarks with subsequent web searches. Users must do separate searches for old and new content (i.e., separate searches of old bookmarked pages and the world wide web). A few bookmark-related services (e.g., furl.net) permit a single search query to search both the user's bookmarked pages and the web, but the search results are not integrated: the search results from the user's bookmarked pages are listed separately from the web search results.
Eurekster.com assumes that a web page is useful based on the time spent viewing the page by the user and/or by a member of the user's social network, rather than using the user's explicit analyses. For example, Eurekster.com infers that a web page is useful if the page is viewed for more than a predefined amount of time, such as one minute.
Thus, it would be desirable to develop methods, systems and user interfaces that help a user search more efficiently using the user's analyses of prior search results.